I’m closer to the door, so I tell her, “I got it.”
His familiar sandalwood scent hits me before I’m through the doorway.
I wish I didn’t want him. It would make all this so much easier.
Get in. Get out.
I walk across the room to turn off his desk light, but the picture on the filing cabinet on the back wall snags my attention. It’s a picture of him and Kristie in a hospital room. Her belly is swollen, so it was taken before Wren was born. Probably hours before Kristie died. How is he able to look at this every day? Even if it’s been seven years.
“It’s not what you think,” Poppy says from behind me.
I quickly straighten. “I was just… he left his desk light on.”
“Delaney.”
I put my hand in the air. “I’m fine. It’s fine. He clearly loved her. Let’s go get those flowers so you can get where you need to be.”
Poppy steps in front me, blocking the doorway, and I draw back. She crosses her arms as if she’ll wait me out all day. So, I broach the subject first.
“I can’t judge. I married someone else too.”
“You know, I always found it interesting…” She steps around me, going back into his office. “For a man who says he can’t move on because he loved his wife so much, he sure doesn’t like to look at her.”
“He has pictures of her, of them.” I motion around the room.
She nods. “Sure, but none of them face him. Like the wedding photo, tucked into the right-hand corner of the bookcase on a shelf with his nerdy plant pictures.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“And this one is behind his desk. Since when does someone turn around to look at a picture in their office?” She picks up the photo I was looking at. “This is for whoever is sitting there.” She points at the chair that faces his desk.
“I thought you had to go?” I don’t want her giving me reasons to want Bennett, reasons to think he’s over his deceased wife and looking to move on.
“BFFs trump my plans.”
“I have a feeling your only plan is for me to drop off the flowers.” I’ve heard the Owens, Noughtons, and Ellises all meddle in their family’s lives, pushing them to find themselves. This flower thing could be Poppy trying to get me into Bennett’s presence with the hopes that we find our way back to one another.
“Noooo,” she says, but her smile says otherwise.
“Don’t meddle, it’s unbecoming of you.”
She rounds his desk and hooks her arm with mine, leading me out of the room and turning off the lights. “Meddling? Unbecoming? I gotta knock that California out of you, and I definitely need to get you to The Hidden Cave. You’re probably all over the Canary Wall one and two.”
“Oh god, I hope not. What would they say?”
“You’ll find out… so you get it, right?”
She doesn’t let me go until we’re out the front doors by our cars. “What?”
“I like to think I know Bennett pretty well, him being my cousin and business partner, and let me tell you—I think he likes to play the lonely widower because it stops people from asking any questions.” Her eyebrows lift, and she kisses my cheek. “I owe you for taking the flowers.” She stops midway to her car. “Of course, if things go right, you might owe me.”
“Oh my god, Poppy, I’m a married woman.”
She steps up on her Jeep’s doorframe but peeks over the roof at me. “Not really. You told me the papers are signed and just waiting to be processed.”
“Go!”
She laughs and climbs into her Jeep, driving off.
